Storing Wind Power

Storing Wind Power. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

Wind energy. It’s free and can generate large amounts of power. But, it isn’t consistent and that problem has Craig Wilkins, Vice President for Zinc Air, Inc. working to come up with a cost effective solution.

WILKINS: Zinc Air has basically been incorporated for the last 3 years. We started looking at the grid-scale storage as it’s been commonly known, it’s the holy grail. We went out and set up technology that hadn’t been developed, different chemistries and dis a tremendous amount of research trying to figure what is the best chemistry as well as the battery system type that would meet the grid-scale needs of tomorrow.

They came across a technology that had originally been developed in the late 70’s but never finalized.

WILKINS: And at that point we put together a team to develop the technology, make it full scale. The problems that you have with wind energy is number one it’s unpredictable and the other big problem is it’s variable. So even when the wind is blowing it’s not always blowing at a continuous pace. So you end having and creating a lot of problems on the grid with that variability. In order to, quote, firm up the wind or create a cleaner power source out of that energy, you can utilize a battery to either supplement power when it’s blowing and help firm up or even out that power.

Or the energy can be stored and then delivered when it is needed. But this kind of battery storage is a far cry from the batteries you can get from the store.

WILKINS: There’s a lot of different chemistries and battery types that fit very specific needs. Lithium technology is fantastic for running your laptop and your cell phone but when you start looking at large scale storage and that is where you are storing megawatts of power not just kilowatts or watts of power, you’ve got to be able to find the right type of chemistry that can do it safely and cost effectively.

Wilkins says the technology is being developed so that it can be kind of like a child's building blocks where they can scale any project up or down depending on the needs. They are getting very close to scaling up this kind of large scale storage.

WILKINS: We are right now moving towards our commercial tooling to get ready for our commercial deployment. We expect to be able to deploy at megawatt scale in the first quarter of 2013. We’ve got several projects we are currently working on and working out the details. But we expect Q1 of 2013 we’ll have a product in the field.

For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.???www.harvestcleanenergy.org